Lucie Whitehouse was born in Warwickshire in 1975, read Classics at Oxford University and now lives in London. She is the author of The House at Midnight.
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
The House at Midnight
First published in Great Britain 2010
This electronic edition published in 2010 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Copyright © 2010 by Lucie Whitehouse
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For Polly and Sophie
Chapter One
I was standing on the shingle bank when they towed her boat back in. The last of the sun was slipping below the horizon, pulling the dying day after it, turning the water of the Solent black. On the far shore, two miles away across it, the lights of the mainland blinked on. The lifeboat was coming up from the Needles, its orange decks a bright mark in the gloaming, but the throttled-down rumble of its engine reached over the surface of the sea like a growl. At a distance the hull of the sailing dinghy was barely visible; it bobbed childlike on the wake of the bigger boat.
The stones crunched under my feet as I started to move. Behind me, the wood that reached down to the rough beach had become amorphous, the branches and tangled undergrowth suddenly a dark mass which met the sea’s approach with silence. I broke into a run but I had come further than I thought; it seemed a long time before I reached the tarmac path again. I ran through clouds of my own breath, sucking in lungfuls of air heavy with salt and tar and the stink of rotting seaweed.
I had been on the harbour front in the morning when the flare had gone up. At first I hadn’t remembered what it was, the rocket’s long whistle, the moment’s pause before the cracking sound and the streamers of smoke descending through the white sky. A minute or so later, though, a battered blue car raced past and was abandoned on the quayside, the driver’s door left open, and a bicycle flew round the corner and was flung down, its back wheel still spinning. Two more men came running from the road by the roundabout. The lifeboat’s engine was already roaring and in a matter of seconds it was gone from the harbour, a skirt of churning water behind it, out into the Solent where it powered up and fled. The people on the quayside had watched until it disappeared from sight. I asked a man outside the lifeboat office which I’d seen on the corner. ‘Local woman’s missing,’ he’d told me. ‘Out in her boat.’
I didn’t know why it felt so important to be there now when the boat came back in. I left the tarmac path, met gravel as I climbed the slope away from the sea wall, and then, at last, I came out on to the road again, heart pounding in my ears, calves burning with acid. Another couple of hundred yards and I reached the river bridge. There in front of me was the town, scarcely more than a village: the stout stone buildings hunkered down beyond the quay, ready for whatever came at them, the brick chimneys of the George hotel standing four-square and resolute in the twilight. I could see the lifeboat again and heard it slow as it came inside the harbour. Less than a minute later, the engine was cut and silence fell.
It was as if the town had taken an inward breath. Nothing moved. The pavements were deserted, the roads empty of cars. Those parked on the quay waited for the next ferry with their engines turned off. The breeze that had played melancholy music through the rigging of the yachts during the afternoon had died away, and the boats sat motionless on their moorings. Even the seagulls, keening since dawn, were mute now.
As the bridge brought me to the harbour, I made myself slow down. I had no right to be conspicuous here. Instead of following the pavement on to the quay, I kept back by the wooden barrier that divided the ferry lanes from the road. Two of the lifeboat crew were on the pontoon already, the high tide lifting the platform so that their heads and shoulders were visible above the edge of the quay either side of the little boat’s mast. Their voices were low, and too far away for me to make out. On the deck of the lifeboat a man in a heavy waterproof jacket paused at the stern for a moment to look down at them, the rope he was coiling hanging in slack loops between his hands. Behind him, the lights in the cabin went out.
There was another man standing on the quay wall directly in front of me. Despite the cold, he was wearing only jeans and a thin shirt. He faced away over the harbour, silhouetted against the sky so that his body was hardly more than a black shape, an absence of light or an intensification of the darkness. He was tall, remarkably tall, and the breadth of his shoulders suggested power but he was gripping the top of the metal railing as if he were trying to keep himself from being blown away by a wind which no one else could feel.
Suddenly he turned. He was crossing the tarmac with long strides, coming towards me. I drew back but the barrier was only knee-high and offered no cover. I was directly in his path. His head was down, his eyes fixed on the ground. I willed him not to see me but, just as he passed, he looked up.
He wasn’t much older than I was: perhaps thirty-five or -six. His hair was dark and there was several days’ stubble on his cheeks but in the glow of the streetlamps, his skin had a lunar pallor. His eyes were wide open but moved over me without seeing. The rest of his face was blank, as if there were no expression that could reflect what he was feeling, and as he went by, the air around him seemed to tremble with the force of it.
I stood still for a minute or two after he’d gone, listening to the quick sound of his footsteps as they faded, feeling the sweat cooling on my skin.
They had found her boat, I realised, but they hadn’t found her.
Chapter Two
When I woke the next morning, my T-shirt was twisted around my torso as if I’d been wrung out while I slept. Since coming to the Island I was finding it hard to fall asleep at night and harder still to wake up: I watched as the clock chewed its way through the small hours and then surfaced from a dreamless oblivion to find the watery light of late morning seeping through the curtains, the sun already nearing the top of its shallow November parabola. The disorientation of waking in an unfamiliar bedroom usually meant I started the day with a few easy seconds but today the sequence of events which had brought me here replayed itself in my mind immediately, as if the key images had been sketched into a flick-book and I only had to thumb the corner to see them all dance before me again.
To stop them, I got out of bed at once and walked the two steps to the window. Outside, the static silence of the night before had lifted: there was a car coming round the roundabout, its engine audible through the old glass, and two others waited at the temporary lights on the bridge. Seagulls wheeled over the estuary, their wings flashing white against the sky, their cries rising like unkind laughter.
I put on the jeans and jumper I’d thrown over the back of the chair when I’d undressed and pulled my hair off my face with my hands, retyin
g the ponytail that had worked itself loose against the pillow. The stairs dropped steeply down off the narrow landing into the kitchen where I had put my boots by the radiator to dry. Their leather was still clammy when I slid my feet in.
Stepping out on to the path, I locked the door behind me and pocketed the key. The house was in the middle of a row of cottages originally inhabited by Victorian coastguards. I hadn’t recognised it when I’d first seen the picture on the internet; with Dad, we’d always stayed at the further end of town, where the backs of the houses looked out over the marshes. A brick corridor and a wrought-iron gate separated the terrace from the street and, to reach it, I had to pass the fronts of several of my new neighbours’ houses. Each one was narrow, with only a kitchen window and a door above a single step. On the other side of the path were areas of yard perhaps ten feet square, some with flower pots and hardy roses still just in bloom, others occupied by tiny outhouses or spinning washing lines. I strode along with my head down, not wanting to have to engage with anyone, but there was nobody to see me anyway.
The gate clanged shut and I was on the pavement. I crossed the small road and passed the Wheatsheaf pub on the other side. It was open already and the yeasty aroma of beer seeped out on to the street. I remembered this shortcut to the newsagent’s from years ago, when Matt and I had spent our pocket money there on pink rock that said ‘Yarmouth’ all the way through and which we’d sucked into points so sharp that they’d cut our tongues. I didn’t remember it like this, though; everything seemed slightly too small, as if the whole town was a scale model built at eighty per cent of the proper size. The fish bar wasn’t open yet but the smell of cooking fat was heavy in the air outside the café next door whose board offered all-day breakfasts, and egg and chips. In Quay Street the magnifying mirrors in the chemist’s window display – more than thirty, I guessed – glinted in the light like big round eyes.
The smell inside the newsagent’s two doors along hadn’t changed in twenty years: carpet made damp by wellingtons and deck-shoes, seasoned with wet dog and newsprint. I breathed it in, olfactory time-travel. The atmosphere, however, was different: it hummed with the barely suppressed excitement of those who have been close to a disaster. I was one of only three or four customers but the air was alive; everything seemed to vibrate with it.
The woman at the till flicked a glance at me. Her eyes stopped for a moment on the side of my face, registering it, but then moved away: I wasn’t the person she was watching for. She leant her hip against the counter, folding her arms high across her chest, and went back to talking to her friend, face confidential. I walked over to the magazines and pretended to browse, hoping they would forget I was there and take up again where they had left off. They kept their voices quiet, however, and though they were only a few feet away, I strained to hear what they were saying about the thick fog apparently due to roll in over the Channel. Had they been talking about something else when I’d come in?
In the end I gave up the attempt to eavesdrop and bought a copy of the County Press. As the woman handed me my change, I hesitated. I wanted to ask her if there were any developments on the news that would be in the paper but I couldn’t. In a town this size, it was possible – likely – that she knew the missing woman personally.
I hurried back the way I’d come, feeling the cold against my cheeks like a damp cloth after the muggy warmth of the shop. The sky was the same white as it had been the previous day, unmarked by any texture or line in the cloud, and infused with a dirty light. I felt claustrophobic under it all of a sudden, as if it were a stifling blanket being lowered down over my face.
At the house again, I spread the huge paper over the kitchen table and searched for the story. I found it at the bottom of the third page. It was short, just three paragraphs.
Fears for Yarmouth Woman
There are serious fears for the safety of a Yarmouth resident after her sailing dinghy was found floating off the back of the Island near Freshwater Bay.
Lifeboats from Freshwater, Yarmouth and Lymington joined the coastguard helicopter in the search for Alice Frewin, 34, after she was reported missing by her husband. Mrs Frewin’s boat, a scow named Vespertine, was recovered by the Yarmouth crew on Thursday evening and towed to Yarmouth harbour.
Peter Frewin, the missing woman’s husband, had believed her to be visiting family on the mainland but raised the alarm when his wife’s sister claimed that there had been no arrangement between them to meet and he discovered her boat had been taken from its mooring in the Western Yar. The search continues but, with sea temperatures now low, hopes for Mrs Frewin’s safe recovery are fading.
Next to the story was a photograph. I leaned over the table to look at it more closely. The newsprint blurred the picture and she hadn’t been looking directly at the camera, but with a shock of recognition I realised I’d seen Alice Frewin before.
Three days earlier, my first full day on the Island, I’d gone walking in the afternoon, partly to distract myself, partly to start getting my bearings again. At the end of the passageway I’d turned right and walked the fifteen or so yards to where the street met the town square. There, too, little had changed. The grocery was still on the corner, its green-striped awning rippling in the breeze, and opposite it was the yacht chandlery whose stone step, I remembered, had a deep groove worn into it by centuries of feet. Then there was the Bugle pub, the white walls of the little branch of Lloyd’s bank, the café in the wooden hut at the start of the pier. The garden of the George hotel was screened by a thick hedge. Two people had been in evidence: a grey-haired woman pulling a canvas shopping trolley and a man on the bench by St James’s church on the other side of the Square, bending slowly to pet the Yorkshire terrier which snuffled round his feet. Apart from the look of the few cars parked at the kerb, there was nothing much to suggest that I hadn’t been teleported back to the 1950s.
I had taken the road that led off the Square by the grocery: the High Street. There were more tiny local shops: a jeweller, a florist, a place selling old-fashioned women’s clothing. Signs on the doors of a gift shop and a restaurant said they would be closed until spring. A faded poster outside the police sub-station proclaimed the importance of the Neighbourhood Watch.
The shops ran out as the street went on and then I was walking between two facing rows of houses, some cottages, some substantial properties, in a range of architectural styles. There was a huge Gothic mansion, its leaded windows obscured by the lush magnolias that dominated its garden, and a little further along, the four-storey North House, so fresh-painted and pristine it wouldn’t have looked out of place in Kensington. Smaller but equally beautiful houses came after it and I looked surreptitiously through their windows, seeing the ornaments on their sills – the vases and plates and photographs – and the ordered rooms beyond. Occasionally in the houses on my left, I could see all the way through to the Solent, past the easy chairs and kitchen tables positioned for the view. Only in one of the rooms was there a light on, the yellow glow of a lamp pushing back the creeping grey of the afternoon.
The High Street came out at a common that sloped steeply to a tarmac path along the water’s edge. I’d made my way down across the long autumn grass and followed it, letting my feet fall into a rhythm with the grey-green waves that slapped at the concrete sea wall. Their briny smell mingled with the scent of mud and wet grass. Across the Solent, the mainland was little more than a thick green stripe; above it, another bank of cloud was massing.
Along the length of the path there were benches and on the last one, furthest from the houses, a woman had been sitting. Her posture had caught my attention immediately. She was perched on the edge of the seat, the tension in her body palpable even at a distance, as if she was primed to spring up in an instant, fight or flight. She wore a khaki parka jacket, its hood rimmed with fake fur, and one of her hands pinched the material of it close to the base of her throat. The other held a cigarette that she brought to her mouth with darting movements. Her hair w
as long and blonde, and the wind blew it about her face.
Her anxiety mirrored mine so closely it was as if I was looking at myself, and I had been filled with a sudden desire to talk to her. ‘Excuse me,’ I said, approaching. My voice was thick; it had been almost a day since I’d spoken. ‘I’m sorry to ask but do you have a spare cigarette?’
She’d looked up sharply and I realised that she hadn’t been aware of me in the minutes that it had taken to walk along the front towards her. Her eyes were glistening, as if she had recently been crying and was on the verge of tears again, but a flicker of interest that died almost as soon as it sparked told me that she’d noticed the side of my face. I turned away a little to hide it. A moment passed and then she reached into the pocket of her coat. Marlboro Reds: too strong. I took one anyway and wordlessly she extended her lighter.
‘Thanks. Do you mind if I . . .?’
She waved her hand quickly over the bench, granting permission.
It had rained around lunchtime and the seat was covered with fat drops of water that the wind hadn’t yet dried. I cleared the worst of it with the arm of my jacket and sat down, careful not to trespass into her space. The wind buffeted me, too, and I tucked my hair behind my ears to stop it whipping round my face. There were only a handful of boats out but coming up the Solent, midway between us and the mainland, was a large yacht, its huge white sail fat with wind. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see her watching it, too. Her legs were crossed now and her top foot bounced to a hectic secret rhythm.
‘That’s a beautiful boat,’ I said, tentative.
She’d glanced at me, surprised that I had spoken again, and brought her cigarette to her lips. She looked exhausted. Her eyes, though bright, were underscored with dark rings. Her hair had been recently highlighted – expensively, I thought – but it was dirty, the roots dark. ‘Yes,’ she said. Her foot kept bouncing. ‘Do you know about boats?’
The Bed I Made Page 1